Saturday, February 11, 2012 - 7:30 p.m.
Gurf Morlix/Sam Baker
Tempting as it may be, don't just judge Gurf Morlix by the company he keeps, even if it does provide a fine starting point: eminent musical artists like Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Warren Zevon, Patty Griffin, Robert Earl Keen, Buddy Miller, Mary Gauthier, Tom Russell, Jim Lauderdale and Slaid Cleaves, to name but a few. As critic Henry Cabot Beck notes on Amazon.com, "If anybody is still looking for a candidate to replace Robbie Robertson in The Band, look no further. Morlix can write, sing, produce, and play nearly every instrument (mostly stringed) and has a bottomless (albeit muddy) range of American musical idioms from which to draw." Through more than four decades of professional music endeavors, Morlix has distinguished himself with his innate musicality, exquisite taste, keen creative instincts, and well-honed ear for not only songwriting but also the elements that bring songs to their fullest fruition.
Sam Baker's is a hard-hewn grace, transcendentally wrought with grit, brutally chiaroscuroed by a weary deliverance sought in common lives. Persistent in Baker's vision is an empathetic evocation of treading life's stilled waters, beauty welled in the dirt of daily endurance. His characters, drawn with the insight of Townes Van Zandt and John Prine, toil unglamorously, overlooked save for Baker's rough, sing-talk psalms giving them fitting voice. His songs are closely observed narratives of eccentric and marginalized people finding meaning in seemingly defeated lives--almost like Leonard Cohen’s, if Cohen had been a Baptist raised in west Texas. There is tenderness and vulnerability in Baker’s songs, perhaps a product of his own nearly-wasted life. An adventurer of sorts, he was almost killed when the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas blew up a train he was riding in Peru in 1986. Not your usual songwriter bio.
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